Half-Life 2 at 20: Valve’s Iconic FPS Gave Players the Power to Shape Their World

Playing a first-person shooter game in the era before 2004’s Half-Life 2, one would have been accustomed to certain rules, a crystallized way of thinking about the way the player was generally allowed to interact with the environment. Say your character is traveling down a road, but then encounters a blockage–burned out cars littering the way forward, impeding your progress. In just about any FPS prior to Half-Life 2, the automatic response would have been “I need to find a way around this obstacle.” But in Valve’s reinvention of the FPS genre, that mandate morphed into “I’m going to clear the road,” arguably for the first time, tossing those cars aside like they were nothing with the aid of the instantly iconic “gravity gun.” The game’s groundbreaking physics engine and unprecedented application of freedom and player ingenuity forced players to effectively reprogram their base assumptions of what would and would not be possible in the context of a first-person shooter. It was the opening of a Pandora’s Box for the industry, a sea change event that made the production of FPS games significantly more difficult in the years that followed for each and every one of Valve’s imitators, who were now expected to live up to an entirely different standard. Every shooter becomes either “before Half-Life 2,” or after.

Of course that particular, transformative quality was already associated with the franchise at this point, following the similarly deep influence of the original Half-Life, which had been released in 1998. Prior to the first game, the nascent FPS genre was conceived in terms of straightforward run-and-gun games like DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Duke Nukem, Star Wars: Dark Forces or … Chex Quest, games that didn’t ask for much of the player besides an itchy trigger finger. With the notable exception of 1994’s System Shock, games in this mold had rarely espoused “cinematic” aspirations in their storytelling, mostly serving up wave after wave of enemies for the dopamine hit of gunning those mooks down. Half-Life’s use of intense scripted events transpiring around you–while the player retained full control, rather than transitioning to cut scenes–served to create a greater sense of immersion in the story of the Black Mesa laboratory disaster, as you steered the silent cipher of Gordon Freeman toward the prevention of an alien invasion. The tandem of these two games set an expectation: A Half-Life title meant significant innovation of the FPS genre.

This very expectation, though, would ultimately become the basis of why the narrative begun in Half-Life 2 was never actually concluded, following its continuation in the Episode One DLC in 2006 and Episode Two in 2007. As part of Half-Life 2’s recent 20th anniversary documentary from Valve on YouTube, company president Gabe Newell finally opened up on the aborted development of Episode Three, saying that the mere mandate to “finish the story” would never have been enough to force the game’s release, when he and other members of the team felt unsatisfied with a lack of innovation driving the game’s raison d’être. In the end, Newell stuck to his guns and buried Episode Three, saying that “the failure was–my personal failure was being stumped. I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode Three was pushing anything forward.”

Aside from the well-received side jaunt into VR that was Half-Life: Alyx in 2020, then, Half-Life 2 remains the last full game, core entry in the series of the last two decades. And like many other fans of the series–lord only knows how many hundreds of hours I spent playing the galaxy of mods (Day of Defeat, Counter Strike, Natural Selection) that followed in the years after the original Half-Life–I recently fired up the Half-Life 2 campaign for the first time in a decade or so, curious how well it would hold up to my modern gaming sensibilities. Granted, modern AAA first-person shooters are hardly the genre I’m playing most often in the 2020s, but a return to the cutting edge of 2004 was still an illuminating reminder of both everything that made Valve’s classic such a mind-blower at the time, and everything it contributed to the genre that now feels entirely standard.

Playing Half-Life 2 in 2024

The first thing that stands out, firing up Half-Life 2 these days, is the timelessness of its craft and storytelling, as the ever-mysterious G-Man, who has still never been anywhere close to explained, omnipotently places the mute Gordon Freeman onto a train arriving in the dystopian citizen processing center of the glum-looking City 17. The player is dropped in entirely cold to a setting with little in common with the underground laboratory of Half-Life: Now we’re in an urban center, learning that two decades have passed and the world has come under the dominion of an alien empire that is slowly integrating itself into our society with the help of an army of human quislings and collaborators. The game’s high-budget pedigree shines through in the sterling quality of the voice acting: Professional actors like Harry S. Robins, Robert Guillaume and Merle Dandridge elevate the experience in a way that is all too easy to overlook as you’re drawn into the filmic setting of a repressed, totalitarian city with a simmering underground resistance movement. In particular, I love the droning speeches of Combine puppet ruler Dr. Wallace Breen (Robert Culp), which seem to play on a loop in City 17 as Breen extolls the virtues of being conquered and assimilated into a star-faring civilization that will definitely not crush any dissenters under its heel. His seemingly earnest and logical belief in the spineless surrender he’s advocating for makes for a perfect, overarching antagonist presence.

Still, the experience is pretty conventional for an immersive sim-type game until the moment when Alyx first hands you the so-called gravity gun, which reveals the depths of the physics engine around which Half-Life 2 was based. Most of the implications of its use are quickly obvious to the player: Use it to pick up debris and move it around; stack boxes to reach inaccessible areas; chuck flammable barrels at Combine soldiers, etc. But the depth to which you can interact with objects that aren’t really critical to the gameplay was still surprising to me now, 20 years later. There are so many of these objects–like an unmanned Combine APC–that would have been rooted to the ground in any prior FPS, just a piece of set decoration, that with the gravity gun can suddenly be shoved around at will. When I approached that vehicle sitting near a cliff side, I didn’t legitimately believe that I was going to be able to push it over onto the rocks a hundred feet below, but the giddy joy of senseless destruction was just as present now as it was in 2004 as I watched it tumble over the edge and explode below. There was absolutely zero gameplay necessity for allowing the player to be able to do this–no reason at all, besides the fact that it would be satisfying. Before anyone had coined the term “rage room” for a paying experience in the real world where you get to break fragile objects, Half-Life 2 was offering up the digital equivalent.

This freedom to smash shit blends seamlessly with the scripted action sequences or fights triggered by entering a specific area, and combat highlights enemy A.I. that can still be brutally effective at times. Playing now, I’m impressed by the way enemy soldiers in particular don’t simply forget about the player when they’re out of sight like Metal Gear Solid rubes–they’re smart enough to pathfind their way to you even if it takes a while, and love to flush the player out of his hiding place with grenades. Human and alien foes will break down windows or doors to get to you, and generally always pose a threat, although the flip side of this is that they’ll become aware of the player at unrealistically far distances, attempting to shoot you with futile shots from practically over the curvature of the Earth. But by and large, the action serves to deepen the immersion rather than draw you out of it, whether it’s the dreadful, Night of the Living Dead homage of Ravenholm, or battling Combine soldiers along the coast, or their fortified prison. And always, there are reminders of the tactile nature of the environment sprinkled throughout–like the spindly pier supports holding up soldiers during the fanboat segment, which you can gleefully smash through to collapse the entire structure. Half-Life 2 never feels better than when you’re embracing the very elements that Valve most wanted the player to appreciate.

With that said, there are also inconsistencies that work to break the immersion in places. Level design is a strength, but some of the platforming is needlessly finicky, requiring unrealistically deft jumps and awkward, repeated repositioning of items such as boxes and barrels in order to progress. City streets are laid out in a frequently bizarre fashion, with door entries and little dead end streets that turn off in one direction but don’t actually go anywhere or serve any particular purpose. It’s easy to miss a turn or interactable doorway and not know exactly how to progress thanks to these quirks, not to mention the persistent, pitch-black darkness of indoor spaces, which requires the constant flicking on and off of your flashlight, draining your hazard suit’s ability to sprint. Who would have thought that “flashlight battery management” would be a constant hindrance?

NPC allies, meanwhile, so often a hindrance in this type of game, become a major hassle in chapters such as “Anticitizen One” and “Follow Freeman!”, frequently blocking doorways or inadvertently pinning Gordon Freeman in place as enemy soldiers riddle you with bullets or explosives. You can tell that Valve wanted the player to feel like they were taking a more active role in this rebellion as its bespeckled figurehead, a captain of men leading regular citizens into direct confrontation with their oppressors, but the combination of cramped quarters (ruined buildings, prisons, sewers, etc.) with a squad of NPC followers just isn’t a good formula to keep the action moving at the same propulsive pace as earlier in the game. Half-Life 2 is always at its best when you’re on your own–or perhaps when accompanied by the hilarious, hulking robotic amalgamation that is Dog, who makes up for awkwardness with sheer humor value.

If anything, the least satisfying aspects of the game when played today are just those parts that Valve was justifiably most proud of in the moment, which in some cases leads to sequences that vastly overstay their welcome by the time you finally complete them. Perhaps most notable is the airboat sequences of “Water Hazard,” which last for well over an hour of gameplay as the player repeatedly runs up against variations of the same hazards to be cleared or jumped in order to progress to the next sequence of similar hazards. At the time, players had never had an opportunity to interact with such a tactile vehicle in a game, to use ramps and (bouncy as hell) physics to do absurd stunts in quite this fashion. Today, such things are commonplace … thanks in no small part to Half-Life 2, and the likes of “Water Hazard” drag as a result. You take the bad with the good, revisiting a game made two decades ago.

All in all, Half-Life 2 holds up remarkably well, though we should acknowledge that it has benefited over the years from the occasional spit shine and graphical overhaul to Valve’s Source Engine. This results in some amusing disparities that can occasionally be seen within a single image–try talking to Father Grigori and admiring how attractive the expressions and textures are of his face, and then glance over at the hilariously polygonal rifle he’s holding, looking like an artifact of an earlier era, for a prime example. At the very least, it’s indicative of how Valve was prioritizing the elements that really mattered: Setting, character, narrative and immersion. He can clutch that janky-looking gun all he wants; what’s important is that the essence of the character gets across.

Even by today’s standards, Half-Life 2 remains a masterpiece, one of the most dramatic quantum leaps forward in sophistication that the first-person shooter genre has ever undergone in the course of a single game. In some ways, it set a bar so high that even Valve struggled to determine how they were meant to follow it up in the two decades that have followed. Given the company’s recent willingness to engage in more discussion on the tumultuous and eventually abandoned Episode Three, one has to wonder if this is an indication that Half-Life and Gordon Freeman are in the process of being revived in some totally new capacity, finally unshackled from the lingering legacy of the uncompleted Episodes. As ever when it comes to Valve’s secretive development, details will surely be locked up tight, leaving fans to wish and wonder what kind of fantastical adventure could be worthy, in the eyes of the likes of Gabe Newell, of the title Half-Life. But after two decades, it feels like Dr. Freeman should be ready to swing a crowbar one more time.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.